For various information processing apparatuses such as personal computers or mobile phones, it is required to surface mount, as electronic components, capacitors, inductors, varistors, or a complex part of these on a circuit board to install the electronic components with high density and to downsize the circuit board as a whole. This promotes the reduction of thin film capacitors in profile. The reduction of thin film capacitors in profile allows circuit boards to be highly integrated, which broadens the field of application, bringing many advantages.
Since a ceramic material forming a dielectric layer of a thin film capacitor involves electrostrictive effects, a mechanical strain according to an applied voltage is generated. For this reason, when an AC voltage is applied to a thin film capacitor, the thin film capacitor vibrates due to the electrostrictive effects of the dielectric layer thereof. By the vibration of the thin film capacitor due to the electrostrictive effects, vibration sound (hereafter, referred to as noise) is generated.
In conventional ceramic capacitors, as a technique to suppress noise, a technique and the like are known in which a metal terminal is disposed on a side face of a ceramic capacitor element to increase the total length from a substrate to a terminal electrode, so as to efficiently suppress the propagation of generated noise to the substrate (Patent Literature 1). In addition, there are a technique and the like to enhance the spring property of a metal terminal, so as to further reduce noise (Patent Literature 2).